‘Monkey Business’ (1931) is the Marx Brothers third movie and the first not to be an adaptation of a stage play. The movie is a non-stop delight–75 or so minutes of one laugh after another., And yet the last line of the film is famously (amongst Marxists anyway) disappointing. After
Continuing this weeks uncanny resemblance between Julius ‘Groucho’ Marx’s character Rufus T. Firefly in ‘Duck Soup’ and the current President of the United State, we come to the movie’s brilliant opening song in which Firefly lays out the rules of his administration. Given that our current Presidents early goals included
Continuing our comparison begun yesterday between the current Presidential Administration and Rufus T. Firefly’s rule of Freedonia in ‘Duck Soup’ (1933), here is a rather terrifying example of a ninety year old piece of comedic art predicting the future of American politics all too accurately. Among the many mad appointees
I try to keep this blog as apolitical as possible, steeped as I am in popular culture of another era–which may be seen by some as a method by which I avoid the present day. (By the way, if that’s what somebody thinks, they’re right). But the extraordinarily ugly events
Wouldn’t it be lovely if the Marx Brothers were next Sunday’s Super Bowl halftime entertainment instead of…whoever the hell it is? Well, the next best thing is watching them play a little old-school football and what better way to begin than with the climax of ‘Horsefeathers’ , which depicts a
Today is Kay Francis’ 120th birthday–or would have been had she not died in 1968 at the age of 63. When I was a kid in the early 1970s, the Marx Brothers revival was in full swing and theaters around L.A. often did all-day showings of the Paramount Marx output
Behold this nifty hour-long mini-doc called ‘Home Again; The Marx Brothers and New York City’. It’s a very well done and charming look at how the comedian-brothers grew up, what their heritage was and how New York City formed and shaped their personas. I realize that it’s not exactly breaking
When Ted Turner began to colorize black and white classics in the 1980s the entire film buff/film history/old Hollywood community rose in a uproar. How dare he desecrate the gorgeous and historic black and white films of the past! Who was this heathen who couldn’t appreciate the true cinematic art
Color film began much earlier than most people think–it was in 1908 that Kinecolor process was first introduced. But I’m only one sentence into today’s post and already I’m getting lost in the weeds. The purpose of today’s viewing is to demonstrate a later (but still early) process called MultiColor.
Yesterday I posted a reel of trailers of a number of Marx Brothers movies. The reel failed to include trailers for their first four films and, in an uncharacteristically lazy moment, I theorized that perhaps they’d been lost. Wrong! Above is the trailer for their third film ‘Monkey Business’ (1931)